Some organizations choose to enter each donation twice, once in their donor management system and again in their accounting system, as a way to provide checks and balances in their system. The upside is increased protection against errors while the downside is increased time by both development and finance to reconcile their records on a regular (usually monthly) basis. Little Green Light always allowed for the basic export of all the gift information you’d need for this kind of reconciliation, but we recently got a request from a customer to help her make the whole process a bit easier and more efficient.

Instead of the usual export in CSV format (that required extra cleanup and formatting in Excel), Megan Farkas, the development coordinator at the Sant Bani School, wanted to be able to pull a particular month’s deposits in a format she could just print or email without alteration. On the surface, those extra steps might not seem like a big deal, but they fly in the face of our belief that Little Green Light should give you the information that you want in the format you need without requiring you to jump through hoops. To that end, we worked with Megan to create a custom PDF export format that provides her with exactly the information she needs. Here’s what the new workflow looks like when she wants to grab the previous month’s deposit report from Little Green Light:

1. Go to the Fundraising Tab and select “deposit date” on the date filter, then choose “Last month” from the dropdown
2. Click the “Export results” button and select the “Deposits” export type; save the export
3. Download/print the results

Just like that, in about 30 seconds flat she has a nice-looking PDF with all of the information she needs in a format that she doesn’t have to re-create every month. Here’s what it looks like with some test data:

The only thing that’s missing now is automating the process so Little Green Light will email her the report at the beginning of every month. That’s a feature we have in the works, and it should be ready (along with a slew of other reporting updates) within the next month or two. We’d like to thank Megan for working with us to provide her with a better report. We encourage all of our customers to do the same, so please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to do so.

A cornerstone of successful fundraising is stewardship. It’s been said many times before, and it’s true. Good stewardship leads to increased support from your donor base.

Stewardship can open up an untapped reservoir of potential funds, but it is an art that is often forgotten or neglected because nonprofit organizations doing fundraising either don’t have a systematized way to track their donors, or they have a system or database that is inaccessible to all but one or a few expert users. No system, or a system to which a few have access, means little visibility into who’s being contacted, when that contact is being made, and what the current status of the relationship is.

Say your data is stored in a database or in a handful of customized spreadsheets. Either way, it is probably managed by one or two people who are trained in handling or know the ins and outs of these tools. When that information needs to reach members of your staff, board, and volunteer base, it has to go through these people, and its flow tends to become bottlenecked. Your organization’s best advocates are now waiting rather than accomplishing tasks and asks on your behalf.

A big advantage to using a system like little green light™ (LGL) is that it has expertise and intelligence built in to help you with stewardship. For example, LGL automatically identifies and tags your top 100 donors, lapsed donors, and active donors. This means you can get quickly get a view into the status of your relationships with existing donors with one or two clicks. You might find some low-hanging fruit in your top 100 lapsed donors who haven’t given for the past eighteen months.

If you do a good job of keeping your key supporters engaged, they’ll increase their level of support. That whole effort can then build on itself, encouraging a groundswell of support because the benefits will be seen and felt by your constituents, your staff, your board members, and your volunteers.

People used to primarily gather in empty classrooms or meeting rooms in houses of worship to strategize about raising money. This still happens, but with today’s busy schedules, this close collaboration can be more challenging to achieve. This is part of why we decided to build little green light™, among other reasons, namely:

• Lots of nonprofits are out there doing fantastic things for society;
• They all need to raise money;
• The best way to raise money over the long term is to build relationships with individuals.

That last item harkens back to a fundraising method some may find old-fashioned, but in fact it far outperforms the others. Despite all the Twitters and Facebooks and e-mails and flyers and events and mailers and memberships, it still holds that the number one thing you can do to fundraise is gather a group of people committed to your mission and allow them to build relationships with individuals on behalf of your organization.

This is hard work, but it’s not out of reach for the people that little green light™ was designed and built to assist. Anyone can accomplish it. You don’t need to know a secret handshake. You don’t need to send out an internet blast using just the right wording. You can simply invite people dedicated to your mission to join together and do what they can do best for you, which is to feel genuinely passionate about your cause and to talk to others who are also passionate about it. little green light™ makes it easy to do all those things—engage, share, and expand the number of folks who are doing that fantastic and important work.

Because little green light™ is shared across the internet, it in effect is the modern equivalent of gathering in the basement of a church or synagogue or mosque or in an empty classroom. Given life’s current fast pace, it enables you and your board and team to get together more frequently and stay on the same page more easily using the same method that’s been successful across history.